Archetypes

What are Archetypes?

Archetypes are content template files in the archetypes directory of your project that contain preconfigured front matter and possibly also a content disposition for your website’s content types. These will be used when you run hugo new.

The hugo new uses the content-section to find the most suitable archetype template in your project. If your project does not contain any archetype files, it will also look in the theme.

hugo new posts/my-first-post.md

The above will create a new content file in content/posts/my-first-post.md using the first archetype file found of these:

1. archetypes/posts.md
2. archetypes/default.md
3. themes/my-theme/archetypes/posts.md
4. themes/my-theme/archetypes/default.md

The last two list items are only applicable if you use a theme and it uses the my-theme theme name as an example.

Create a New Archetype Template

A fictional example for the section newsletter and the archetype file archetypes/newsletter.md. Create a new file in archetypes/newsletter.md and open it in a text editor.

---
title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}"
date: {{ .Date }}
draft: true
---

**Insert Lead paragraph here.**

## New Cool Posts

{{ range first 10 ( where .Site.RegularPages "Type" "cool" ) }}
* {{ .Title }}
{{ end }}

When you create a new newsletter with:

hugo new newsletter/the-latest-cool.stuff.md

It will create a new newsletter type of content file based on the archetype template.

Note: the site will only be built if the .Site is in use in the archetype file, and this can be time consuming for big sites.

The above newsletter type archetype illustrates the possibilities: The full Hugo .Site and all of Hugo's template funcs can be used in the archetype file.

Directory based archetypes

Since Hugo 0.49 you can use complete directories as archetype templates. Given this archetype directory:

archetypes
├── default.md
└── post-bundle
    ├── bio.md
    ├── images
    │   └── featured.jpg
    └── index.md

hugo new --kind post-bundle posts/my-post

Will create a new folder in /content/posts/my-post with the same set of files as in the post-bundle archetypes folder. All content files (index.md etc.) can contain template logic, and will receive the correct .Site for the content’s language.